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The destiny of the largest mining deal in additional than a decade lies within the fingers of a Canadian magnate who constructed a fortune on copper and coal.
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(Bloomberg) — The destiny of the largest mining deal in additional than a decade lies within the fingers of a Canadian magnate who constructed a fortune on copper and coal.
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Norman Keevil Jr., 85, is the controlling shareholder of Teck Sources Ltd., a mining firm he constructed along with his father almost six a long time in the past. At this time, the Vancouver-based agency produces copper and zinc from a handful of mines scattered throughout the Americas, and steelmaking coal from profitable operations in Canada.
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These belongings make Teck interesting to international miners attempting to find extra of the economic metals that underpin the worldwide transition to cleaner vitality, prompting Swiss commodities large Glencore Plc to make an unsolicited $23 billion bid on March 26.
Glencore’s curiosity doesn’t assure a deal will get finished. The Keevil household’s management of Teck via voting shares has lengthy insulated the corporate from takeovers. Whereas Canadian metals producers like Falconbridge Ltd., Inco Ltd. and Alcan Inc. fell to overseas companies within the early 2000s, the household’s iron grip stored Teck impartial. Even now, Keevil reveals little curiosity in promoting the corporate he spent a long time constructing.
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“He’s just like the final of a era of mine builders in Canada,” mentioned Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Affiliation of Canada. “You consider all these folks that constructed Canada’s greatest mining corporations, and Norm is the final one standing.”
Keevil was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938 and spent the higher a part of his childhood in northern Ontario’s wilderness. His father, a Harvard College graduate turned prospector, deserted academia within the Nineteen Fifties to develop a small copper deposit close to a distant settlement named Teck Township, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) north of Toronto.
‘Relaxation on Your Ores’
The mine grew to become a household enterprise, and Keevil joined his father’s firm after finishing a doctorate in geology from the College of California, Berkeley within the early Nineteen Sixties. In a 2017 memoir, By no means Relaxation on Your Ores: Constructing a Mining Firm, One Stone at a Time, Keevil recalled attending month-to-month board conferences in a log cabin on an island throughout from the mine.
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“Norm and his dad actually began the corporate from grassroots, with nothing,” mentioned Edward Thompson, 87, who befriended Keevil in school and have become considered one of Teck’s first executives.
Keevil shared his father’s penchant for high-stakes enterprise gambles, and when Keevil took over as chief govt officer in 1982 he enacted a flurry of acquisitions that netted the corporate a few of its most profitable base steel operations. On the apex of the Eighties oil shock, he borrowed closely to finance oil and coal tasks in Canada’s western provinces. Later, he sought backing from Japanese and Chinese language traders to pitch in on costly mining ventures additional north.
Keevil didn’t possess the standard bravado of mining executives of the time, Thompson mentioned, calling him “aggressive in enterprise, however fairly soft-spoken — nearly shy.”
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“Once we’re collectively, I typically have hassle listening to him as a result of he’ll discuss so quietly,” he mentioned.
Nonetheless, Keevil hardly ever minced phrases when it got here to enterprise. Throughout the battle to accumulate Inco in 2006 — which drew bids from overseas companies in addition to Teck — Keevil mentioned its CEO “offered Canada out for his personal functions.”
At this time, Keevil lives in British Columbia and has largely retreated from public life. He holds a spot within the Canadian Mining Corridor of Fame and has departments named after him on the College of Toronto and College of British Columbia. Keevil didn’t reply to Bloomberg requests for remark.
After Glencore’s proposal, Keevil — who holds an honorary place as chairman emeritus at Teck — issued a short assertion on April 3: “I unequivocally help the board’s resolution to reject Glencore’s unsolicited provide to accumulate Teck. Now shouldn’t be the time to discover a transaction of this nature.”
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Teck has been protected against such takeovers because of the Keevil household’s uncommon alternative in 1969 to separate shares of the corporate into two courses, with one set carrying extra energy than the opposite. By a holding firm referred to as Temagami Mining Co., the household has the vast majority of class A shares, every entitled to 100 votes, whereas the general public has class B shares, which carry one vote.
“With out the safety of our dual-share construction, Teck would have been swallowed up,” Keevil wrote in his memoir. “We may have been the goal of an opportunistic takeover and a longtime Canadian mining champion misplaced to overseas fingers.”
Learn Extra: Teck Sources to Spin Off Coal and Simplify Share Construction
Company filings launched April 3 confirmed that Teck board members started talks with Keevil a yr in the past to contemplate collapsing the share construction, citing rising investor unrest. Keevil and the board spent about 4 months negotiating earlier than arriving on an settlement in January.
That deal, which requires approval from shareholders in an April 26 vote, would give the Keevils six extra years of management of an organization they’ve so rigorously guarded.
“It’s like giving your child away,” Thompson mentioned. “It’s powerful to see one thing you spent a lifetime creating disappear.”
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